Hi Anna. Yep, agreed.

You are absolutely right that one can get invoved in the early stages, and indeed should be involved as early as possible. I look forward with delight to the day when non-testers instinctively think so too! :-)

All the best...
Andy

Hi Anna

Re the entrepreneur mindset/testers take out the garbage/figgy pudding thread:

Firstly, forums always frustrate me because its difficult to articulate an argument sometimes when you have limited wordspace. Sorry to confuse you, I guess it's the nature of medium!? :-)

As suggested, let's come away from that thread because the points we stumble on are not relevant to how to "influence entrepreneurs", which was its supposed purpose.
(However, I must say that I was quite surprised at how little response there was about that very question, because without entrepreneurs none of us would ever have been in a job...let alone a testing one!)

To address the confusion I caused, all I am asserting is that testers should not go into any start-up/embryonic organisation believing that they have a natural right to equal billing with the inventors of that company's products.
Yes I'm a tester, I'm a passionate tester, and I've often had to further the cause of testing in previously-sceptical organisations. I, like you, don't believe testers should be naturally put-upon nor expected to do menial tasks to justify their pay.

But the reality is that one of the reasons why testers often arrive later to the team than others is simply the obvious evolution of any project.
Either an inventor has a brainwave or a business-type-person identifies a commercial requirement for something. That something is then designed in their head, scribbled on paper, hmm-and-ahhed over as a business possibility, roughly costed-out...and the need for quality assurance and testing is still far away.
At some point a plan appears and an expected result can be defined. From here on in the tester can really take a major role, scoping requirements etc and doing their stuff.
In a mature corporation, one can sometimes afford to bring testers in at day-one and give them some authority to set ground rules. In a start-up especially, they will be expected to justify their value much more and that, commercially-speaking, is not a bad thing.

Are you with me so far...?

So, in summary, all I was trying to say previously was that testers need to be very very aware of the business realities when working in start-up situations. It may be unpalatable to have to muck in but, as you say, so long as everyone else does then that's probably OK.
Yet the likelihood is that the other guys in the team will be busy on their respective proper-job stuff sooner than the tester is, simply by the natural way of things. If the tester can accept that fact and pick-up possibly a disproportionate amount of the non-proper-job stuff for that crucial early phase, then soon enough their testing will begin to fill their day and their "influence" will be felt across the team.

I hope that makes some sense. If not, well let's park this for now because I suspect repeating myself over again is not going to make it any clearer! :-)

Cheers
Andy

Hi Anna,

I'm new to Selenium and was a Ruby/Watir tester in the past. I recently installed Selenium RC and has recorded a simple html script using IDE. I wanted better control in the html code but I don't know how. For example, I wanted to enter a "rand()*100" number in a certain field. Do you know how to do that in HTML?

I tried generating a ruby counterpart of the html and tweaked it but I can't seem to make a ruby code run in RC (TestSuite.html). Do you know how I can call a ruby code from the TestSuite.html?

Great idea to start the test book reviews group. I'll be reviewing books anyway as part of a work task so no real problem for me to add a review onto here as well
Now which one to start with....

Thanks for the blog posts on Eurostar. It's really nice to have quick updates and opinions of what goes on there.

Thumbs up from Rosie :)

Hi Anna,

I am very much inteersetd in using Selenium for testing my Web application. But i have some doubts on Selenium Core and RC..?
Could u plz help me in clarifying the same...